Seems like Sony has decided to leave Android users with plenty of visual goodness to savor over the weekend through a couple of great new apps. Just yesterday, we saw a beautifully-designed photo gallery app called ‘million moments’ released by the technology giant. Today, we’re going to present you with yet another fine-looking Android app from the company. “α” CLOCK for Mobile lets you experience Sony’s new Time-shift UI on your Android device. The app presents you with photos of several worldwide destinations (UNESCO World Heritage Sites) taken with cameras that use “α” Interchangeable lenses. From a single point, countless photos of each location are snapped at various times of day, and compiled into a single time-lapse photography package. Using the aforementioned Time-shift UI feature, users can enjoy breathtaking sights of the selected location from a preferred time of day. Though, that’s not all the app has to offer.

Before proceeding further, we would like to inform our readers that “α” CLOCK for Mobile has been designed to run only on devices that sport the following two screen resolutions:

480 x 854

720 x 1280

If you own an Android device with a different screen resolution, you’re currently out of luck. Another thing to keep in mind is the app’s comparatively high storage requirements owing to the content that it downloads from its online servers for each selected location. According to the estimated requirement mentioned on the app’s Play Store page, 70MB of free storage space on your SD card should suffice.

As of now, the app lets you enjoy World Heritage Images of as many as five different gorgeous locations of the world. While the image of Mont Saint-Michel, France comes with the app, photos of the rest can be downloaded manually from within the app. These are:

Mount Huangshan, China

Historic Area Of Istanbul, Turkey

Ogasawara Islands, Japan

Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

Each photo can be viewed in full-screen landscape orientation, and scrolled vertically in both orientations (landscape and portrait). The Time-shift UI feature, however, works in portrait orientation only. As mentioned earlier, you can enjoy photos of the selected location from a different time of day by sliding the digital time clock in the top-right corner of the screen up and down. Various dots aligned vertically along the right edge of the screen indicate different points of the day for which a captured image is available.

Sliding this screen upwards reveals the app’s main menu that houses controls for finding Wikipedia information regarding the chosen location, checking the current location on Map, viewing the photo in full-screen (landscape orientation), and sharing the location on Facebook/Twitter.

The social media sharing feature of the app is quite fascinating, too, since it helps users unlock images of various supported locations included within the app’s Collection Image Album. Locations included within said album are the same as the aforementioned ones, however, the angles used for snapping these (locked) photos are totally different, that let you enjoy the same location from an entirely different perspective. As you keep posting and commenting on images on said social networks, your chances of getting your hands on the unlocked goodies improve drastically.

Another fun feature of the app is that it lets you use photos of the selected (or random) location as your device’s default wallpaper, that will automatically update throughout the day for as many as 12 different times.

From within the app’s settings screen (Menu > Settings), you can switch the wallpaper option On/Off, select (and download) a different World Heritage image, view the Collection Image Album, manage your social accounts, and specify the default directory for downloaded content.

“α” CLOCK for Mobile is absolutely free in the Google Play Store, and requires Android v2.2 or higher to run.

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AddictiveTips is a tech blog focused on helping users find simple solutions to their everyday problems. We review the best desktop, mobile and web apps and services out there, in addition to useful tips and guides for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Read more...